Alejandro Agresti charmingly opens The Lake House with calligraphic letters overlapping and bursting into plumes of smoke. The story may be whitebread and cosmopolitan—perfect, then, for the Sex and the City fan club—but its visual textures are boundary-defying. Agresti treats the film’s initially specious premise seriously, almost matter-of-factly, validating it through intelligently considered compositions that evoke a sense of time shrinking in on itself. Living two years apart in the same lake house and sharing the same dog, Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock) and Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves) begin to mysteriously communicate with each other through their malibox’s time-space warp. Agresti puts his characters at center frame, suspended but never really moving, unlike his camera, which pans gently from left to right in some scenes, right to left in others, so that the film conveys a profound sense of spirits gravitating toward each other across space. The moment Kate and Alex touch for the first time is divine, but ripe with more danger than excitement because Agresti’s camera, the way it stealthily crosses a line of poles to get a better look at the time-crossed couple only to then move away from them, foreshadows a journey of withdrawal as slow and perilous as their coming togther. Damn the film for its excessive literally references, its damaging Rachel Portman score, and an ending that isn’t nearly passionate or strong enough to excuse the suspension of belief it demands, but bless it for its overlapping visual textures, its real-world sense of dialgue punctuated with long, melancholic pauses, blithe spirit, and poetic consideration of life reaching out for life—here, there, and everywhere.
Image/Sound
The image, like the audio, is warm and fuzzy, but there are touch-and-go spots: Colors are rich, as are skin tones, but edge enhancement is a subtle nuisance and digital artifacts are visible around brightly colored objects (and, in one scene, the linguine straps of Sandra Bullock’s dress).
Extras
Five additional scenes and outtakes, a theatrical trailer, and previews for Take the Lead and We Are Marshall.
Overall
One could say that the sparse décor of the titular abode’s interior explains-if not necessary excuses-the disc’s slim extras.
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